Music: Contemporaneous and Projeto Arcomusical, at the Littlefield, Brooklyn May 18, 2019

Presented in association with Contemporaneous
Features two world premiere works by Elliot Cole and Ian Gottlieb

Contemporaneous is an ensemble of 22 musicians whose mission is to bring to life the music of the present. In this groundbreaking collaboration with berimbau sextet Projeto Arcomusical, disparate traditions of string instruments collide in an explosion of radical new music that draws from diverse traditions of ancient string instruments. The program builds a musical atlas of the ubiquitous and eclectic history of music for strings, from the kora to the harp to the cello to the berimbau.

In two world premiere works by Elliot Cole and Ian Gottlieb written for Contemporaneous and Arcomusical, the visionary composers reimagine the sound of the berimbau (the one-string Afro-Brazilian percussion instrument known for its use in capoeira) to stretch its expressive possibilities in a new context.

About the composer:
Projeto Arcomusical joins the ranks of the many outstanding chamber music ensembles in the United States that have worked closely with Chamber Music America to develop excellent new works of music via CMA’s Classical Commissioning Program. At our 2014 performance at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, we were fortunate to befriend Elliot Cole, who expressed a strong emotional response to our work. We will work with him over the coming season to create, “Roda,” a fifteen-minute work for berimbau sextet. Roda refers to Capoeira Angola, the Afro-Brazilian martial game that prominently features the berimbau. “Roda” means wheel and as such provides ample poetry and inspiration through not just the musical canon of capoeira but also its deliberate use of the term as a metaphor for the “wheel of life.” The decision to name the work is a nod of respect to this noble tradition. Indeed, Capoeira’s inclusion of the berimbau in its practice is, in fact, largely responsible for the instrument’s thriving culture today.

Contemporaneous: RODA | Trailer | End-of-year Campaign from Contemporaneous on Vimeo.

Film: WALKING ON WATER

Documentary film:

DIRECTED BY ANDREY PAOUNOV

Christo and his late wife/partner Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) created some of the most visually breathtaking art installations of the postwar era, including Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties (1976), Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin (1995), and The Gates in Central Park (2005). The Floating Piers—an ambitious effort to create the effect of walking on water via a 3-kilometer walkway over Lake Iseo in Northern Italy—is Christo’s first large-scale project since Jeanne-Claude’s passing (the two conceived of the idea together). Filmmaker Andrey M Paounov has rare access to Christo’s process, from inception to completion of the installation: thorny negotiations with local government, engineering challenges, crowd control, logistical nightmares and the sheer force of nature, captured through breathtaking aerial views and fly-on-the-wall cameras.

Theater: Feral

Created by Tortoise in a Nutshell
An original co-production with Cumbernauld Theatre
Directed by Ross MacKay

With Alex Bird, Jim Harbourne, Arran Howie, and Matthew Leonard

Joe looks back at the town of his childhood. Bright, vibrant, and idyllic, the world resembles a haven of comfort. But as Joe journeys on, walls and lives are peeled back and the story of a community’s fall unfolds around him.

Feral is an innovative piece of visual theater that combines puppetry, film, and live sound to create and destroy a world in front of its audience’s eyes. Puppeteers manipulate and bring to life a tiny world, whilst simultaneously creating a live animation, as they follow its every breath via digital camera.

Theater: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS at the New Vic, NYC 2019

The clock is ticking! With a fortune at stake, Phileas Fogg and his silly sidekick, Passepartout, must abandon the misty streets of Victorian London and circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days, or lose everything. Get swept up in the adventure as they race across Asia on the back of an elephant, speed by steamer ship over the stormy Pacific and ride the railroad through the American Wild West. Adapted by Laura Eason from Jules Verne's classic novel, this fast-paced, globe-trotting theatrical romp is jam-packed with slapstick hilarity and comic book-style action scenes. Hurry, there's no time to waste!

New Vic Theatre Staffordshire, Kenny Wax Family Entertainment and Simon Friend in association with Royal Exchange Theatre
From Newcastle-under-Lyme, England

Film: MEETING GORBACHEV

DIRECTED BY WERNER HERZOG AND ANDRÉ SINGER

“Here was a man who changed the course of the twentieth century and whose actions transformed the world I grew up in.” – Werner Herzog. Iconic filmmaker Werner Herzog (GRIZZLY MAN, CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS) trains his camera and mellifluous narration on one of the greatest living politicians, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev – the visionary former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Now 87 and battling illness, Gorbachev is nonetheless wide-ranging and revealing in his interviews with Herzog, illuminating his experience in shaping the end of the Cold War (including the cessation of Soviet control of Eastern Europe), the reunification of Germany, and his negotiations with the U.S. to end nuclear proliferation. All of which he achieved in just six years. One diplomat sums up Gorbachev’s approach: “The process went so quickly that… opponents were overcome by the reality of the situation.”

UK / US / GERMANY   2018   91 MINS.

Courage! To The Field! by Else C. Went (after Shakespeare)

Courage! To The Field! by Else C. Went (after Shakespeare)
Directed by Emma Rosa Went

Courage! To The Field! is an alternate-history-play, a good old-fashioned party, and a story told with music. As brand new characters and old favorites alike bump up against the edges of Henry IV, Courage! frames a wild conversation with Shakespeare himself, in which unnamed messengers, vengeful tapsters, and neglected wives turn history inside-out and make it their own. With disguises, swordplay, romance, fiddles, hijinks, and more – history is theatre, and it belongs to everyone.

This workshop production of Courage! To The Field! is made possible in part through a Tim Bond Production Grant from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Courage! was originally written as an entry to the ASC Shakespeare's Contemporaries Project 2018, and was named a semi-finalist.

Creative Team

Else C. Went - Playwright
Emma Rosa Went - Director
Daniella Benavides - Producer
Isabel Smith-Bernstein - Dramaturg
Harrison Densmore - Assistant Director
Crystal Lee - Video Design
Dawn McGurl - Costume Design
Miranda Poett - Lighting Design
Angela Renzi - Production Stage Manager

Cast

Oivia Rose Barresi - Lady Kate Percy
Will Ormsby Cary - William/The Douglas
Gregory Cuellar* - Hal/Glendower
Jovan Davis - Hotspur
Charlie Hankin - Peto (The Fiddler)
Julia Larsen - Anne Frith
Andrea Lopez - Poins/Mistress Quickly/Lady Mortimer
Garrett Lyons - Francis/Mortimer
Matthew Minnicino - Flastaff/Worcester/Blunt

Courage! To the Field! is an Equity Approved Showcase

(*Equity Member appearing with permission of Actors’ Equity Association without benefit of an Equity contract in this Off-Off-Broadway production)

Theater: The Pain of My Belligerence by Halley Feiffer

The Pain of My Belligerence

Written by Halley Feiffer
Directed by Trip Cullman

GUY
I just wanted to see what it'd feel like to tell you to shut up.

Twenty-something and brilliant, Cat is a journalist at the top of her game: tack-sharp and ambitious, and rapidly establishing her place in the field. Until she meets Guy — magnetic, devilishly charming, and married — and the attrition begins. Charting their spiky relationship over eight years, following a rapidly changing America, Halley Feiffer’s harrowing comedy sheds light on how we perpetuate our roles within a patriarchal culture, and the promise of a new paradigm.

FEATURING
Halley Feiffer — Cat
Vanessa Kai — Yuki
Hamish Linklater — Guy
Keira Belle Young — Olive

Theater: Gatz, Elevator Repair Service at The Skirball 2019

https://nyuskirball.org/events/elevator-repair-service-gatz/ 

 “THE MOST REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT IN THEATER NOT ONLY OF THIS YEAR BUT ALSO OF THIS DECADE.” – BEN BRANTLEY, N.Y. TIMES Gatz, the critically lauded performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was last seen in New York in 2012.

Created by Obie-winning ensemble Elevator Repair Service, this multi-award-winning play, with a cast of thirteen, is a theatrical tour de force — not just a retelling of the Gatsby story but a thoroughly entertaining dramatization of the entire novel, word for word.

 Elevator Repair Service, based in NYC, has been making original theater since 1991. Under the direction of Artistic Director John Collins, ERS has achieved national and international recognition with its extensive body of work and has influenced a generation of theater-makers. The company’s performances have been presented in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America and across the United States, and have been recognized with numerous awards. elevator.org.   Gatz will be presented as a marathon eight-hour event, including two intermissions and a dinner break.

Theater: Emily Brown and the Thing, New Vic 2019

Tall Stories from London, England

How will Emily Brown ever get to sleep with The Thing making such a racket?! A friendly but woeful creature, The Thing has lost his Cuddly in the Dark and Scary Wood and won't stop crying. Plucky, brave and determined to save the day, Emily and her trusty sidekick, Stanley the rabbit, leap into action. Tall Stories (The Gruffalo, New Vic 2015) returns with an epic, imaginative musical adventure adapted from the popular picture book by Neal Layton and award-winning author Cressida Cowell (How to Train Your Dragon).

Music: TRAIN WITH NO MIDNIGHT by Joseph Keckler

http://prototypefestival.org/shows/train-with-no-midnight/

Singer and writer Joseph Keckler and an intimate musical ensemble lead the audience through a series of vignettes, each like a stop on a late-night train—from Paris to Hamburg, Michigan to Times Square and the symbolic space of The Crossroads, a place of danger and possibility. The text dances between comedy, commentary, and communion, while the score features smoky pop songs, propulsive invocations, and leaps into the operatic realm.  https://www.josephkeckler.com/

https://vimeo.com/josephkeckler

Theater: Minefield by Lola Arias

Photo: Carolos Furman

In her trademark political and playful style, Lola Arias brings together British and Argentinian veterans of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas war to share their first-hand experience of the conflict and life since. Digging deep into the personal impact of war, Minefield is a collaboratively created new work that merges theatre and film to explore the minefield of memory, where truth and fiction collide.  https://nyuskirball.org/events/minefield/

 
 

Film: The Arbor (2010) Director: Clio Barnard

Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/movies/the-arbor-a-biopic-of-andrea-dunbar-review.html

From Wikipedia.org:
A film about her life, The Arbor, directed by Clio Barnard, was released in 2010. The film uses actors lip-synching to interviews with Dunbar and her family, and concentrates on the strained relationship between Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine. The film was nominated for a BAFTA award for Outstanding Debut by a British Director, and won the Sutherland Trophy, at the 2010 London Film Festival Awards. It also won the Sheffield Innovation Award at the 2010 Sheffield Doc/Fest.

Theater: MINOR CHARACTER

New Saloon’s irreverent mashup of English-language translations of Uncle Vanya – from the dusty 1916 edition to Google Translate’s profoundly whack results – is a kaleidoscopic amplification of Chekhov's depressing comedy. Each character is interpreted by multiple actors and through multiple translations, in an athletic attempt to say one true thing. “I’ve been made a complete fool,” Vanya says, “foolishly betrayed,” Vanya agrees, “stupidly cheated,” Vanya clarifies.

Created by New Saloon
Directed by Morgan Green
Dramaturg: Elliot B. Quick
Composer: Deepali Gupta

Text: Anton Chekhov
Translations: Marian Fell, Laurence Senelick, Paul Schmidt, Carol Rocamora, Milo Cramer, and Google Translate

Featuring Milo Cramer, Ron Domingo, Rona Figueroa, Fernando Gonzalez, David Greenspan, LaToya Lewis, Caitlin Morris, and Madeline Wise

http://www.newsaloon.org/

Film: THE BAKER’S WIFE (1938)

Marcel Pagnol’s
THE BAKER’S WIFE

Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Starring Raimu

Winner, Best Foreign Film, New York Film Critics Circle Awards

(1938, Marcel Pagnol) When his drop-dead gorgeous young wife Ginette Leclerc (the disabled femme fatale of Clouzot’s Le Courbeau) runs off with a young shepherd, middle-aged Provençal village boulanger Raimu (César of Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy) goes on strike, refusing to produce another loaf until she comes back. The apotheosis of the great French actor Raimu (“The greatest actor of all time” – Marlene Dietrich; “For me, the greatest actor in history” – Orson Welles), in a film once extolled as the ne plus ultra of European filmmaking – with a risqué theme unimaginable in Hollywood movies at the time – but long unseen in any form. DCP restoration. Approx. 124 min.

Presented with support from the George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE


​THE BAKERS WIFE -TRAILER from Janus Films on Vimeo.

Film: CAPERNAUM (2018)

DIRECTED BY NADINE LABAKI

Winner of the Jury Prize at the most recent Cannes Film Festival and recipient of an 8-minute standing ovation, CAPERNAUM (the word is a French reference to hell), centers on a 12-year-old Beirut street urchin (Zain) who sues his parents in court for bringing him into a world of desperate poverty. Disgusted by his parents – who sell his sister in exchange for some chickens – Zain teams up with Rahil, a young Ethiopian refugee whose infant becomes his companion. Director Nadine Labaki’s neo-realism has been compared to that of De Sica and Rossellini. She has been lauded as “astonishingly accomplished” (Jay Weissberg, Variety) for her vision of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that ensnarls its subjects with regulations that make their difficult lives nearly impossible. The two young leads in the film, today, live in Norway and France. “A film that already feels like a landmark.” (Robbie Collin, The Telegraph, UK)

LEBANON    2018   120 MINS.  IN ARABIC AND AMHARIC WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

Film: Shoplifters, director Hirokazu Kore-eda 2018 Japan

Kore-eda’s

Cannes Palme d’Or winner is a heartrending glimpse into an often invisible segment of Japanese society: those struggling to stay afloat in the face of crushing poverty. On the margins of Tokyo, a most unusual “family”—a collection of societal castoffs united by their shared outsiderhood and fierce loyalty to one another—survives by petty stealing and grifting. When they welcome into their fold a young girl who’s been abused by her parents, they risk exposing themselves to the authorities and upending their tenuous, below-the-radar existence. The director’s latest masterful, richly observed human drama makes the quietly radical case that it is love—not blood—that defines a family. An NYFF56 selection. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Theater: BOING! at the New Vic 2018

"If you want Santa to come, you have to go to sleep..." But Joêl and Wilkie are way too excited for snoozing! Rambunctious pillow fights, robot dance battles and silly sibling shenanigans do nothing to tucker out the two bouncy brothers in this playfully imaginative, award-winning, dance theater production. 

Cast:
Joel Daniel
Wilkie Branson

From Travelling Light Theatre Company
Bristol, England

Theater: THE TRUTH ABOUT SANTA at The Tank, NYC 2018

The Tank and Theater of the Apes present
THE TRUTH ABOUT SANTA
An Apocalyptic Holiday Tale  by Greg Kotis
Directed by Ilana Becker
Music Direction by Steven Gross

Many people think they know the truth about Santa, but they are wrong. Ho ho ho, children! Santa has some shocking unadvertised powers, a couple of half-mortal offspring his wife hasnt found out about yet, and a lot on his mind. He’s tired of those damn singing elves. Hes tired of the lies. This is the Christmas Santa will reveal his true self. Prepare for the Ragnarök, urm, SANTA CLAUS' RETURN TO OFF-OFF-BROADWAY.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Greg Kotis (playwright) is the author of many plays and musicals including Urinetown (Book/Lyrics), The Sting (Lyrics), Lunchtime, Give the People What They Want, Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards, Yeast Nation (Book/Lyrics), Pig Farm, Eat the Taste, and Jobey and Katherine. Future projects include ZM, an original musical about teenaged fast-food workers trying to survive a zombie plague. Greg co-founded Theater of The Apes with his wife Ayun Halliday, and is a member of the Neo-Futurists, the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. He grew up in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where he celebrated Christmas with his secular Jewish family, and now lives in New York City where he waits each year for Santa’s return.

Theater: THE RUSSIAN AND THE JEW at The Tank, NYC 2018

Anna & Kitty, Inc. and The Tank present THE RUSSIAN & THE JEW Co-written by Liba Vaynberg and Emily Louise Perkins

THE RUSSIAN AND THE JEW is a political fairy tale that explores anti-Semitism and misogyny through a female friendship in the Soviet Union in 1968, underlining the eternal question of fidelity to one's self, one's partner, and one's country. The project was created as a part of the COJECO BluePrint Fellowship, supported by COJECO and Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Music: The Argus Quartet at Metropolis, 1 Rivington, NYC 2018

The Argus Quartet (in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble), perform works by Ted Hearne, Juri Seo, along with the NYC premiere of Christopher Cerrone's Can’t and Won’t and How to Breathe Underwater for quartet and electronics. Dec. 3, 7pm at Metropolis Ensemble’s venue, 1 Rivington.